Archive

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It’s laughable to hear conservatives describe President Obama as being “divisive.” After all, they’re the folks rattling on about the lay-about 47-percenters, race pimps and, in the words of erstwhile GOP candidate Herman Cain, “stupid people ruining America.”

The recent pronouncements by former NYC Mayor and professional political charlatan Rudy Giuliani are only the most recent examples of this GOP characteristic.
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President Obama’s fairly anodyne speech before the recent National Prayer Breakfast has right-wingers’ panties in a knot. They evidently expected to be told that Christianity is the “awesomest” religion in the world and that it’s OK to associate muslims with terror. Instead, the know-nothings got a History 101 lecture.
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Like almost all proposed presidential budgets, Obama’s most recent package of taxes and spending is largely a political statement designed define priorities and serve as a starting point for negotiations. And as has been the case for the past six years, almost nothing in the Obama administration’s proposal stands a chance of ever being fully enacted. The budget plan has its faults — there’s no meaningful attempt to address entitlement reform, for example — and the proposal to pay for much needed infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.) through tax increases on the very wealthy and corporations will surely be shot down by a bought-and-paid-for GOP majority in congress.

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Forget Joni Ernst, Rand Paul, that tea party character and all the other right-wingers who delivered the various GOP responses to President Obama’s State of the Union address. The real response comes from Speaker of the House John Boehner, who essentially gave the White House the political middle finger by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address congress.

Boehner and Netanyahu are upset that the president is conducting foreign policy — which is a thing that presidents do under our constitution — through closed-door negotiations with Iran over its alleged nuclear weapons program. By inviting Netanyahu, Boehner is effectively trying to foul those diplomatic waters.

So much for Boehner’s and the GOP’s whining about Obama trampling the constitution with an executive order regarding illegal immigration. By inviting a sitting head of state to effectively short-circuit a president’s constitutional prerogative, Boehner both trashes said document and demonstrates a startling lack of loyalty to his nation.
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2014 was a regular annus horribilis mostly. Russia invaded Ukraine, annexed Crimea and later found itself staring into the fiscal abyss in the midst of a global oil-price war. ISIS rolled over the Iraqi army and forced the Obama administration to face a raft of bad choices. The U.S. started to come to grips with the realities of its policies regarding torture. Factor in pot legalization, the ever-balky rollout of Obamacare, the right’s obsession with Benghazi and the political mendacity surrounding our Ebola “epidemic,” and it’s hard to argue that 2014 wasn’t one for the books.
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